The Story of My Father by Sue Miller Page A

average-sized man. But he was slender and compact and modest, he spoke quietly, he moved in such a contained way that he seemed smaller than he was.
    My mother seemed larger. She was long-limbed and wildly expressive. She had long feet too, slender and beautifully arched, with, as far back as I can remember, bright red polish on her toenails in summer. She was excessive in all she did. She spoke in italics, in absolutes: “I will
never . . .
”; “a complete and utter
fool!
” She had a loud, gay, genuine laugh, and then too a loud, gay, artificial laugh.
    All her life, my father was charmed by her, amused by her, excited by her, and I think occasionally annoyed by her. But he was never, even when she was at her most unreasonable, openly critical of her.
    And she could be unreasonable. Sometimes it was funny.

    One of my uncles told me a story at her memorial service of coming into the primitive kitchen of the camp in Maine early one morning to find Mother alone there in her bathrobe, her face still puffy from sleep or lack of it, drinking coffee, smoking, glowering. She looked at him balefully—he was a cheerful person—and, before he could speak, said, “Don’t you
dare
say good morning to me, Jim Alter!”
    Others outside our family also found her wonderfully eccentric and amusing. Several of my cousins told me after her death she was their favorite aunt. One of my father’s students said she was the most interesting, the most stimulating, of all the faculty wives.
    It was harder to live with her daily, to have her moods be the emotional weather you faced on any given morning. But if there was anyone suited to do it, it was my father. Steady, patient, changeless himself, he rolled with whatever the punch was—though sometimes that detachment, that distance, was the very quality that drove her mad.
    Late in his life, but before he was obviously ill, I spent long parts of several summers alone with my father, and he talked to me more than he ever had before about himself. During that time he occasionally expressed regrets to me about this distance. He thought he had hurt my brothers by not being more involved with them as children. He blamed himself for not helping my mother control her drinking, her smoking. But this was a brief period, really, in his long life—only a momentary dwelling in introspection and regret. Very quickly his dispassion, brought on this time by his disease, came to him again. The dying of his brain took away the possibility of some new way of looking at things which he seemed on the verge of finding. And perhaps, after all, this was a variety of kindness.
    Some researchers now think that these processes, the processes that caused parts of my father’s brain to die slowly, probably begin much earlier than we’ve realized before in Alzheimer’s sufferers. Their work suggests that Dad could have been a victim of the disease for much longer in his life than even the most careful observer might have guessed.
    The markers for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are the plaques and neurofibrillary tangles that accumulate in the brain and slowly kill the neurons—the nerve cells—of which the brain is largely composed. These plaques and tangles aren’t visible in the living brain through any of the current technologies. It is true that when you scan the Alzheimer’s patient’s brain for activity, parts of it are blank—wide Seas of Forgetfulness in the fissured, moonlike surface. But this could be caused by any of a number of other diseases or insults to the brain. In fact, until recently, the only way to know definitively that someone has had Alzheimer’s disease was retrospectively, posthumously, by autopsy—by looking at the dead brain for those characteristic plaques and tangles.
    The tangles—neurofibrillary tangles, or NFTs in the literature—are altered neuronal elements: actually formerly part of the brain but changed both in structural appearance and chemical nature. The